The monstrous beauty of the 17th century, all its aspiring whorls and lopsided rhetoric, its weird configurations and ghastly echoes, and the vast empty spaces evoked by its obsessive detail—all this is apotheosized in the Anglican priest, John Donne. In poetry and person, he embodies the Baroque paradoxes: a sinful rake turned saintly relic, a superstitious poet taking his metaphors from the most revolutionary science available, an Anglican whose greatest works are the products of Ignatian meditation, a favorite of the king thereby forced out of civil service into the church, a great authority on Air and Angels, Love and Lust, Form, Fancy, and Free Diction.
[...] Donne's primary fame today, however, relies on a body of poems, the Songs and Sonnets, written between 1590—1617 (three years after his ordination). The poems of dramatic or narrative poets are chiefly interesting in themselves, being projections of the poet's imagination independent, at least conventionally, of his own personality and beliefs—the analyst considers the story and characters and pronounces, simpliciter, upon whatever psychological, philosophical or moral ideas he finds in them; whereas, in the case of the lyric poet, he must view the poem as a direct expression of the author, indicative of his ideas or emotions, however hidden in irony, imagery, etc.; the analyst must therefore pronounce upon the ideas of the lyric poem, with the qualification that he is pronouncing upon the author. [...]
[...] Donne couldn't even take his degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, though he studied at both institutions, because, being a good catholic, he refused swear allegiance to the protestant Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps Donne found the pressure too great—eventually he converted to Anglicanism, after an intense study of the differences of Catholic and Protestant theology. Going over thus from his family's religion, to whom it would naturally take on the colors of apostasy, may have had a lingering effect, so that his future polemical vehemence against Rome was partially an attempt to convince himself of his own earnestness. [...]
[...] He climbed the pulpit of that cathedral the first time propelled there by his polemical vigor and poetic eloquence alone. He addressed a crowd larger and more attentive than any he could have expected in his first-sought career as a civil servant. But we know this preferment and unlooked-for advance failed to satisfy his ambition, for the simple reason that it was gone. As marrying his wife had cut short his career thirteen years ago, her death, prior to his ordination, fitted him for a new career. [...]
[...] I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking up the short sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer.” Father Brown has the makings of a first-class dramatist. [...]
[...] The more prominent, unexpressed and unintelligent excuse, is that of biographers who would really like to be able to read the poems as episodes in the life of John Donne and thereby swell their already bloated volumes with a bit more scandalous speculation. Apart from the requisite artistic virtuosity, a dramatist requires a peculiar psychological acuity—an acuity, born not of introspection like a modern writer's, but of inspection and empathy. We are presented with a choice: either Donne was a wicked, perverted, self-deluding philanderer with a gift for expressing his depravity, or he was an incomparable dramatist possessed of great empathic abilities. [...]
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